Data Structures: Information for foreign students

(Updated 20.1.2003)

How to take part to the Data Structures course in spring 2003

Only one foreign student has expressed interest to the Data Structures course. That is certainly not enough for an English exercise group.

There are some problems:

The course material in WWW is in Finnish, and it is not clearly based on any book, neither English nor Finnish.
The exercises are based on this unique Finnish material.

Some parts of the course are, anyhow, related to a book written in English:

Mark Allen Weiss: Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in Java. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999.

My suggestion is:

The English speaking students are allowed to take part to the two examinations of the course:

Friday 28 February, 16-20, Main Building, hall 1 (Fabianinkatu 33)
Wednesday 9 April, 16-20, Main Building, hall 1 (Fabianinkatu 33)

And I can make questions in English, based on the Weiss' book. All the 30+30 points come from the examinations; The Finnish students get 24+24 and 12 from the exercises. Points needed for passing are normally 30. If you are going to take part to an examination, please remind me a couple of weeks before the examination day! Otherwise there will be no English questions...

What to read in the Weiss' book

The contents and style of programming in Weiss are quite different from the Finnish course. So there is not very clear correspondence between those two.

For the first examination,
- 1.4, 1.5, 1.7, Exercises: 1.13, 1.14
- 2.1-2.4.2, 2.4.4-2.4.6, Exercises: 2.7, 2.10-2.12, perhaps others, too?
- All of chapter 3, Exercises: 3.1-3.10, perhaps others, too?
- 4-4.3, Exercises: 4.1-4.4, 4.9
- One foreign student asked last year: "To be brief, I am having trouble with the data structures course and was wondering if there are any answers available for the Weiss exercises. I checked the web but there didn't appear to be any. My problem is not the programming side but rather the algorithm analysis part. In particular answers to 2.7 would be the most useful. Another point is that the questions are not always clear in exercise 3.9 and 3.10 what does it exactly mean for two lists to be joined by an AND or an OR?"
  As far as I know there are no Weiss' solutions in the Net. About 2.7: You should be able to estimate the O-classes, but no formal proofs are expected. And don't panic with the math; we leave it mostly to the course of Algorithm Analysis. Here it is enough to be able to estimate, compare and talk of different solutions in the jargon of O-analysis.
  About 3.9 and 3.10: These exercises are about implementing sets as lists, those operations are set intersection and set union.
For the second examination,
- 4.3, 4.4, Exercises: 4.9, 4.19, 4.21, 4.25, 4.26
- 5-5.5, Exercises: 5.1, 5.2, 5.8, 5.10
- 6-6.3.3, 6.4.2-6.5, Exercises: 6.2, 6.3, 6.6, 6.12, 6.14
- 7-7.2.1, 7.4(not the analysis), 7.5(not the analysis), 7.6(not the analysis), 7.7(not the analysis 7.7.5 and 7.7.6), Exercises: 7.1, 7.2, 7.4, 7.11, 7.12, 7.15, 7.19, 7.23, (7.24)
- 9-9.1.1, 9.3-9.3.1, Exercises: 9.5, (9.9)